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With a string of improbably-drawn mathemetical equationed creative accounting techniques, Enron, one of the most powerful companies on the planet at the turn of this century, fell like the proverbial bankrupt star from the golden heavens in 2002 - leaving thousands of employees out of work and thousands more bereft of any possibility of a happy retirement. Meanwhile, some of its highest corporate executives, slinked away into the sunset with millions upon millions upon even more millions. After all, these guys are the self-proclaimed smartest guys in any room - a Napoleonic boast made extra laughable by the fact of the whole incident's outcome.
Seeing this documentary about corporate greed and political wrongdoings on the very day that Woodward & Bernstein's legendary "Deep Throat" came out of the closet and named himself the whistleblower of Watergate, just adds to the rushed viscocity and hurried urgency of the film's subject matter - as well as pounding us over the head with the über-arrogant audacity of these fat cat money-mongerers. Everyone from the sharpie-happy Nixon whitehouse to the backroom pipeline double dealings of an Enron-funded Bushwacked Texas Bar-B-Que election-stealing dynasty, desperately need to be held up to the harsh light of fair dealing investigators - here in the form of Documentarian Alex Gibney and source material journalists Bethany McLean & Peter Elkind (an after-the-fact modernization of Woodward & Bernstein?).
Perhaps I'm casting too wide a net here, for this is the story of Enron, and its main protagonists (or antagonists, depending on which side of the bronze bull you happen to be standing on), Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow - corporate greed and Darwinian backstabbing beyond anything ever dreamt of by a knifed and bleeding Julius Caesar. This is the story of how these fratboy-cocky men amassed a billion dollar empire, only to let it run into nothingness (aka: bankruptcy) through shady dealings, cooked books and an overly carniverous rapaciousness (not unlike that of a herd of Spielberg's Velocoraptors stampeding their way through the streets of Houston, New York and a rolling thunderous blackouted California of Schwarzeneggerian epicity) - all the while smilingly telling their employees to sink everything they have into Enron's eventually skydiving stock portfolios. This is the story of what Oliver Stone's alliteratively shark-toothed Gordon Gekko would call good. "Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit." Of course tell that to the electrician lineman who just hocked his once vastly 401K for a measly twelve hundred dollars just after the multi-millionaire CEO of Enron (the lineman's parent company) cried his crocadile tears for the cameras of CNN and MSNBC. Scary and poignantly scurrilous, the only thing missing is the hissing of Darth Vader's succubent tongue, and we could be living the revenge of the Sith all over again.
Maybe not the most exciting doc to make its way into theatres and though not a particularly stylized documentary (like Errol Morris would create), nor much of a decisively razor-tongued whiplashing work (like that of fat ole rabble rouser Michael Moore), nor even much of a surprisingly fascinating kitsch piece (like Jeffrey Blitz's Spellbound), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is still full of some sort of cocksure intensity that makes the fall of the mighty that much more fun to watch - even if that fun is sometimes sidestepped by a big fat what-the-fuck!? spit-take.
- June 1, 2005
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